Jesse draped his arms around me and pulled me close. “Rowen, I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so damn sorry you had to go through that.”
I nodded into his shirt, feeling a couple of tears about to leak out. “Are you all right?” I pulled back so I could examine his face. His hair was a little rumpled, but that was the only sign he’d been in a fight.
“He never even landed a punch,” he answered, running his thumbs under my eyes to wipe the tears away. “I’m just fine.”
“Sweetheart,” Rose said, tears streaming down her face as she approached us. “Oh, my sweet, sweet angel. I didn’t know. I never would have let them come if I’d known—”
I shook my head. “I didn’t even know until he walked into the kitchen. I’ll be fine. Really.” No one, least of all Jesse, looked convinced. “If you all don’t mind, I just need a moment.” I walked away. As Jesse started following me, I clarified, “Alone. To sort a few things out.”
Jesse’s forehead lined, and Rose looked like she was fighting her instinct to wrap me in her arms.
“I’m fine,” I said before turning around and heading for the barn. I didn’t want to go back into the house to witness the mess I’d inadvertently been responsible for, so the barn would have to do.
I jogged inside and checked once over my shoulder to make sure no one followed me. Everyone was filing back into the house. Except for Jesse. He camped out on the porch steps, watching me like he was fighting his instinct to come after me. But he did as I asked and stayed.
I wandered down the row of stalls until I found a clean, empty one with a few bales of straw. It looked like the perfect place to “have a moment” and let everything that had just happened catch up with me.
A few of the horses in the nearby stalls whinnied a welcome, but, other than that, the barn was silent. I dropped down on one of the bales and leaned my back into the stall wall. The thought that kept bursting to the forefront of my mind was how hard I’d worked all summer to make myself better, how I’d actually succeeded, and my mom saw nothing but the troubled juvenile delinquent she’d always seen in me. I knew I could never do anything that would impress her, never do anything to earn her unconditional love and respect.
I’d have to learn to accept that, but I wasn’t sure if I could ever make peace with it. Could a person ever truly heal from that kind of a wound? Only time would tell.
The next thing that worked its way to the front of my mind had me lifting my legs up to my chest and curling into an upright ball. It was a thought, or a realization, or a damned epiphany that I didn’t want to have, but I had it nonetheless. No matter how hard I worked to overcome that troubled girl I’d been, she’d always be hiding just below the surface, ready to pop out when something set her free.
That person I’d been for so long was not removable. She was a part of me. Forever. That girl could rise to the surface before I could stop her. She’d push people away before they got too close, hurt them before they could hurt me. I couldn’t allow myself to be the toxic person to Jesse that my mom was to me. I couldn’t poison his life the way she had mine.
I’d made myself into a better person, I knew that, but no matter how hard or long I worked, I couldn’t risk that dark side of me striking out when I least expected it. I loved Jesse too much to put him through the pain or chaos of my life.
Who knows how much time had passed, but the longer I was alone, the darker my thoughts got. The farther down that trail they went. Only when a hesitant body slipped inside the stall did a ray of light cut through my blackness. Cut through, but didn’t remove it.
“Did I give you a long enough moment?” Jesse asked, standing in the doorway of the stall like he was waiting for an invitation. “Because I can give you more time if you want.” He hitched his thumb over his shoulder.
“Come on in,” I said, patting the bale beside me and scooting over. “I’ve had more than enough moments to think.”
“How are you doing?” he asked, taking a seat next to me. “Wait. That was a stupid question.” Jesse shook his head and looked at a loss for words. “What’s been going through your mind? Besides everything?”
I gave him a small smile. “Besides everything? I suppose realizing the worst part of the night wasn’t Pierce showing up.” I played with a piece of straw. Jesse shifted closer and draped his arm around my shoulders. “The worst part was that my mom invited him here.” Jesse stared at the ground and nodded. “What Pierce did was not right, I’m not excusing that, but he was basically a stranger who had no interest in my life. My mom . . . She’s my mother. She’s the person who’s supposed to love me first, and last, and best. She’s the person who’s supposed to fight with her life to keep scumbags like Pierce out of her child’s life. She’s supposed to . . .” I had to swallow to get the word out, “care.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, kissing my temple.
“I just don’t get it, Jesse. It’s so goddamned unfair. Why? Why does my mother hate me? Why do I feel like the biggest screw up when I’m around her? Why, after everything, do I still want her to look at me and say she’s proud of me and give me a honest to goodness hug?” Another set of tears dripped their way down my face. “I’ve got so many ‘whys’ I’ll never have answered, they’ll probably drive me insane.”
Jesse waited for me to catch my breath and dry my tears before he responded. I was so exhausted, I just sank into his arms and rested.
“We’ve all got questions. We’ve all got dark parts of us that we wonder how they got there,” he said slowly. “We all, at times, feel like the positively most screwed up person to have ever walked the planet. But you know what, Rowen? We don’t always need to know the answers. We shouldn’t get hung up on the questions we can’t answer because life, by definition, is confusing. We’re never going to have all the answers. Never. We should focus on the questions we can answer and make peace with the ones we can’t.”
It was a lovely thought and it would have looked great on an inspirational poster, but Jesse’s life was so very different from mine. His questions he couldn’t answer were easy to move past because they didn’t consume him the way mine did me.
“Jesse, I love you and I love those things you just said, but how could you even think you could compare the questions I have from my fucked up life to the questions that have cropped up during your next-to-perfect life?” I knew Jesse had experienced pain and heartache, every human did, but there was pain and there was PAIN.
Jesse let out a long sigh. “I know my life seems idyllic, Rowen. I know you probably think I’m an idiot for drawing a parallel between your life and mine. But my life wasn’t always so great.” He paused and didn’t say anything else for what seemed like forever. “My life didn’t begin the way it is now. In fact, my life couldn’t have been more different than it is now.”
My brows came together. “What do you mean?” I looked up at him, and his eyes were somewhere else. Somewhere frightening.
“Neil and Rose are my dad and mom, Rowen. I want you to know that because that’s one of the truest things I know. But they didn’t become so until I was five years old.”
“Wait.” I shook my head, sure I was missing something. “What are you saying, Jesse?”
“I was adopted.”
I couldn’t reply. At least not right away. Had I heard him wrong? Had he said it wrong? “You were . . . adopted?”
“Yes. I was taken out of my home when I was four by Child Protective Services. From there, I drifted around in the foster care system for about a year until Neil and Rose—my mom and dad—adopted me.”
The stall spun a bit. Information was coming at me a little too fast. “C.P.S. took you away from your parents?”
Jesse cleared his throat. “They took me away from the people who conceived me.”
I wasn’t sure whose expression was more broken: his or mine. “Why?” It didn’t make sense. Why hadn’t I known? Why hadn’t anyone told me?